Here's Your Chance to Buy a Share of an Actual Cow

Remember when those guys crowdfunded that potato salad?

That was crowdfunding at its dumbest.

Here’s crowdfunding at its tastiest: Pony up some cash, grab a steak in a cow (beef pun intended), and wait … for a side of dry-aged, grass-fed meat to show up at your door.

Welcome to Crowd Cow.

The principles of crowdfunding have exploited the power of the people to support everything from high school science projects to honeymoons, startups and Miles Davis biopics starring Don Cheadle.

In Crowd Cow, though, we’ve discovered a singularly grill-friendly option.

With Crowd Cow, a single cow’s-worth of meat comes up for sale, and you can choose cuts from among its bounty. Buyers can select the “Grill Master Share” (including “one enormous, beautiful, two inch thick, 32.-oz rib steak”; $134) or $16 of premium ground beef, with plenty of cuts in between.

Just like a Kickstarter, only a certain number of options are available with each cow. For example, cows being cows, each one supplies only a single tongue, a single heart and so on. Credit cards aren’t charged until the cow is fully purchased — but with the Washington-based service’s recent expansion to California, we’re confident they’ll go fast enough.

Best of all: Crowd Cow is commited to transparency in the meat-buying process, so you’ll know exactly where your beef was raised. You’ll know that it ate grass, not grain, and that its sale supports local farms, not corporate meat purveyors.

If there’s a better way to buy beef, we haven’t heard of it.